Trump's border wall will require fight to take private land

John Moore / Getty Images

A road crew improves a road along the U.S.-Mexico border on March 16, 2017 in Hidalgo, Texas. According to a Washington Post analysis, President Donald Trump will have to seize private land in order to build a border wall.

A road crew improves a road along the U.S.-Mexico border on March 16, 2017 in Hidalgo, Texas. According to a Washington Post analysis, President Donald Trump will have to seize private land in order to build a border wall.

(John Moore / Getty Images)

Tracy JanWashington Post

The order has been issued for the immediate construction of a Mexico border wall. The specs have been outlined: 30 feet high and "aesthetically pleasing." The next thing on President Donald Trump's to-do list for building his "big, beautiful wall": hire more lawyers for a long and expensive battle over private land.

The wall will cost a lot more, politically and economically, than Trump has publicly acknowledged. To build the wall along the nearly 2,000-mile border — and fulfill a key campaign promise — Trump will need to wield the power of government to forcibly take private properties, including those belonging to his supporters.

Much of the border, especially in Texas, snakes through farms, ranches, orchards, golf courses and other private property dating to centuries-old Spanish land grants. As a signpost to the possible troubles ahead, the government has not finished the process from the last such undertaking a decade ago.

"It's going to be time consuming and costly," said Tony Martinez, an attorney who is mayor of the border town of Brownsville, Texas. "From a political perspective, you have a lot of rich landowners who were his supporters."

Trump, in his recent budget proposal, called for the addition of 20 Justice Department attorneys to "pursue federal efforts to obtain the land and holdings necessary to secure the Southwest border." The Justice Department would not expand upon the details. Of the department's 11,000 attorneys, fewer than 20 work in land acquisition now. Trump's budget would double that.

The last wave of eminent domain cases over properties along the southern border dates to the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which authorized President George W. Bush to erect 700 miles of fencing.

Of the roughly 400 condemnation cases stemming from that era, about 90 remain open a decade later, according to the Justice Department. Nearly all are in the Rio Grande Valley in southwest Texas.

To build the existing pedestrian and vehicle fence, the U.S. government has already spent $78 million to compensate private landowners for 600 tracts of property, according to Customs and Border Protection. The agency estimates that it will spend an additional $21 million in real estate expenses associated with the remaining condemnation cases, not including about $4 million in Justice Department litigation costs.

Researchers and lawyers say eminent domain will continue to be a big issue for Trump, one that could stymie his ambitious plans for an "impenetrable" wall.

"It will be a huge challenge for his administration. It will clog up the courts," said Terence Garrett, a security studies and public affairs professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville. "It's just an affront to property rights."

The Department of Homeland Security would get a significant spending increase in the Trump administration's new proposed budget - a nearly 7 percent boost to expand a wall along the nation's southern border and hire more federal agents to catch, deport and deter illegal immigrants.

The budget...

The Department of Homeland Security would get a significant spending increase in the Trump administration's new proposed budget - a nearly 7 percent boost to expand a wall along the nation's southern border and hire more federal agents to catch, deport and deter illegal immigrants.

The budget...

(Devlin Barrett)

The university became embroiled in a land dispute in 2007 when the federal government sought to build an 18-foot-high wall that would have divided the campus in two. Students would have had to obtain land-crossing cards to go back and forth across campus, even though they were still in the United States, Garrett said.

The university and government ended up compromising on a "pleasant looking" 10-foot-high fence that cut off the city golf course adjacent to campus, said Garrett, who was a strategist for the university president during the lawsuits. But people can easily climb over the fence. And it's not continuous.

The golf course ended up going out of business.

About 10 miles northwest of the university is another Brownsville golf course, the River Bend Resort & Golf Club. A decade ago, the golf course managed to persuade the Bush administration not to build on its property. The existing rust-colored border fence abuts the golf club's eastern and western edges, but it leaves a 1.7-mile gap in between.

The golf course's new owners, who bought it in 2015, say a wall running through the course would be disastrous for business. Fifteen of its 18 holes — and more than 200 homes — would be on the south side of the levee, along which the wall would be constructed, said Jeremy Barnard, River Bend's general manager whose father and uncle own the resort.

If the new wall were to follow the path along the levee, 70 percent of the 319-acre resort would be relegated to a no man's land between the levee and the natural border of the Rio Grande, he said.

"My goal would be to get Trump out to play the course, appealing to the golf course owner and business side of him, and say, 'Look, what would you do?' " Barnard said. "Seven of our holes are on the Rio Grande. You can hit your ball into Mexico, and it comes back into the United States. The beauty that comes with that, the natural landscape, 30-year-old oak trees — this is not a Walmart that I could just go reproduce on any other corner."

It remains an open question how much sympathy Trump would have for Barnard's situation — or that of any private landowner standing in the way of Trump's wall.

As a developer, Trump has wielded the power of eminent domain to make way for his properties.

"I happen to agree with it 100 percent," Trump said during a 2005 Fox News interview. "If you have a person living in an area that's not even necessarily a good area, and ... government wants to build a tremendous economic development, where a lot of people are going to be put to work and ... create thousands upon thousands of jobs and beautification and lots of other things, I think it happens to be good."

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VIDEO:

An area of the River Bend Resort and Golf Club where Trump's border wall would run in Brownsville, Texas. (River Bend Resort & Golf Club)